The pot calls the crystal black

The cat that closed its eyes while lapping up milk it was not supposed to touch thought nobody could see what it chose not to see.A similar piece of idiocy underlies the Congress demand to screen the Aam Aadmi Party’s funding for improper foreign origins: the notion that what is seen alone matters, and that what is not seen shouldn’t bother anyone. AAP discloses the source of every rupee it gets, while the Congress, the BJP and other traditional parties show a minuscule fraction of the money they raise and spend. And in many cases, what you don’t see is more dangerous than the bits you do, as the captain of the Titanic would have testified, if it were possible to from an undersea grave.

Political funding is the bane of Indian democracy. Politics costs money. Quite apart from election expenditure, running a political party itself calls for substantial amounts of money. Party leaders travel, they hold rallies, full-time workers have to be paid, party offices have to be maintained, advertisements and other publicity material don’t pay for themselves and certain kinds of political love can be bought only with money. But you wouldn’t know this, if you looked at the official accounts of political parties.

The largest amount reported by a party was Rs 498 crore by the Congress in 2008-09, when parties were building their war chests for the general elections of 2009. The BJP also reported its biggest income in that year: Rs 220 crore. But does anyone believe that these amounts represented the true income of these parties or financed a fraction of their actual expenditure? Parties and politicians spend tens of thousands of crore of rupees, but never reveal income and expenditure. Where does the bulk of their financing come from?

The sad reality is that Indian politics is funded, for the most part, by the proceeds of corruption. Corruption can be broadly categorised into three kinds. One is loot of the exchequer. This happens when government procurement is based on hefty commissions, schemes like the cattle fodder one in Bihar get used primarily to funnel budgetary resources to political pockets and rural development schemes are routinely used to keep an army of lower level political functionaries happy.

The second method is sale of patronage. Patronage also can take diverse forms. Mining leases or your place in the priority list supposedly meant to be maintained on a first-come-first served basis are obvious examples. Patronising power theft and far worse, criminality, is another kind. Assorted discretion in grant of clearances and permits lend themselves to trade patronage for money.

The third kind is outright extortion. If you want to register land or get a power connection in certain states, you have to pay some money over and above the official fees. In Uttar Pradesh, each bottle of liquor used to sell for a mark-up over the printed maximum retail price and was earmarked for the political boss.

It goes without saying that such forms of mobilising political funding calls for the active collusion of civil servants. In the process of suborning governance to meet their political masters’ demands, they suborn themselves as well. The administrative machinery loses accountability and India plunges to the bottom of any global ranking of countries for ease of doing business.

When funding takes this opaque, illegal form, politics turns into a shortcut to big fortunes. In the name of mobilising political funding, individual politicians raise funds, of which a fraction is passed on to the party.

AAP comes as a breathof fresh air in this scenario. It can account for every rupee it has raised. They should similarly present audited accounts for every rupee it spends. It sets a new paradigm in political funding that eventually other parties would be forced to embrace.

Arvind Kejriwal has done absolutely the right thing by welcoming a probe into its funding and simultaneously demanding a thorough probe into the funding of the Congress and the BJP. You might disagree with the AAP on what it wants to do once in office on things apart from corruption, but you cannot fault it for opaque funding.